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TRUCKEE, Calif. — One of the area’s largest employers is looking to expand its workforce.

Clear Capital, a nationwide provider of real estate valuations and analytics for the mortgage and lending industries, is looking to add up to 80 positions within its Truckee and Roseville offices, on top of its current full-time staff of approximately 360.

Positions available include staff appraiser, vendor service representative and technical staff positions. A full list of positions can be found at www.clearcapital.com/jobs.

This week, Clear Capital co-founder and president Kevin Marshall sat down with the Sierra Sun at the company’s headquarters at 10875 Pioneer Trail in Truckee to discuss the new hiring effort, the state of the company and its future.

Sierra Sun: Can you tell me about Clear Capital’s new hiring initiative?

Kevin Marshall: “Our hiring initiative is based off of three different projects that are all happening at the same time.

“One is the housing industry is finally transitioning out of the foreclosure and default space, which it has been mired in since 2008, unfortunately. More of our customers have more loan origination needs (the process by which someone applies for a new loan), so that volume has been ramping up at a really, really healthy manner.

“Another initiative is that we won some really big contracts on the technical, a workflow platform side of our business where we provide software and data and analytics to clients. …We’re not allowed to announce who the contracts are for yet, but as a result we’ve been hiring a lot of technical folks to support those initiatives.

“The third one is actually a really fun summertime project, so on top of the 80 people we’ve been advertising as needing to hire, we’re also going to be bringing on about 40 to 50 summertime jobs in the Roseville location to perform a special valuation review project for one of out large clients.”

Sun: What’s your reaction to hiring so many people at once?

KM: “Anytime you have this massive growth, you get a little nervous — like, ‘Wow this is a really big responsibility’ — but the responsibility, it’s not a paralyzing or stressful responsibility; it’s kind of a fun responsibility to the community and these people who we’re providing jobs to.”

Sun: When the company was founded in 2001, did you think it would grow to be so large?

KM: “ Our goals were never to be 400 to 450 people. Our goals were to treat our customers really, really well, treat our vendors really well and have a positive place for our staff to work, but in doing that — treating our customers really, really well — there was always this increasing demand for what we did, so we kept on growing and growing.”

SS: How does hiring new people impact the company’s search for a permanent location?

KM: “As we’ve worked with Ciro Mancuso, our landlord, about long term options and as we’ve worked with the (Truckee Tahoe) airport board and JMA Ventures — Art Chapman and his team — we’re always sizing it for how we can house and park 500 people. …We also want to make sure that the location that we choose could scale beyond that as well, if we needed to scale out.”

SS: How is finding a permanent location going?

KM: “It’s going really well. A lot of our discussions right now are determining feasibility with the airport and opportunities there and here at Pioneer Commerce Center with Ciro, so there are multiple viable healthy options for us to be able to stay in town long term.”

Sun: What kind of state is Clear Capital in today?

KM: “We’re in a very, very healthy position at a time when a lot of our competitors are not because our industry is transitioning from really being focused on foreclosure over the last five years into a loan origination. We’ve done that transition once before when we went from loan origination in 2007 to foreclosure in 2008, and we grew a ton between 2008, 2009 because we were well posed to transition. …We’ve been preparing for the last five years for when the market turns, so now the market is turning in 2013, we’re already have the relationships, their products and infrastructure ready to go to support the folks that are originating loans.”

Sun: What’s next for Clear Capital?

KM: “Our path now is to continue to do a really, really good job on the human-based valuations, where we retain appraisers, some realtors to go out and visit properties, provide their price opinions on them.

“But the other part of the business that we’re building up very, very strongly is the technical side of our business where we actually offer our technology as a product. We want to be the software and the data that fuels the real estate valuations industry.

“By having a very robust software business in addition to the service business that gives us a few more legs under our stool, so we have more diversification of our product type. That will just help us be healthily as we weather different real estate cycle trends, or new regulation or new opportunities.”